The primary perquisite of membership is access to
members-only RSS feeds: one containing the full contents of each
article (as opposed to regular (free) feed, which contains only a
brief summary of each article), and another feed for the Linked List.

Quoting from my announcement last year:

But please, I implore you, do not think of this as paying $20
just to get a full-content RSS feed. Think of it as a small
token of my gratitude for supporting my writing at this site.
It’s like when you pledge $100 to PBS and they send you a tote
bag; no one does it to get the tote bag.

Renewals

Those of you who are good with math will note that June 2004, when I
launched the membership system, was quite a bit longer than one year
ago, but that 15-month-old memberships continue to have access to the
feeds. The problem here was simply one of time — when I put together
the membership system a year ago, I never bothered to write the code
to actually deal with expiring subscriptions. I figured I had a year
to get around to it; but, one thing led to another and I didn’t manage
to get around to it until this weekend.

Rather than retroactively expiring memberships without warning, I went
ahead and gave everyone whose membership has technically expired a
free extension to October 17. So, anyone who signed up last summer got
a few free months.

Unfortunate implementation deficiency, of note to any current
members planning to renew: One thing I didn’t get around to,
however, is adding code to support renewing or extending an existing
membership. So instead of being able to add another 12 months to your
existing membership, you have to sign up for a “new” account, just
like new members do. This is mildly inconvenient, because you’ll get a
new membership key, which key serves as your password to access the
members-only feeds, and which means you’ll need to update the password
field in your feed subscriptions after “renewing”.

My apologies for this, but, as always, it’s a matter of time. At every
point where I had time to write membership account renewal code, I
instead chose to use that time to write actual articles for the site.
I’m hoping that’s a trade-off members will understand as they’re forced
to fiddle with updated feed passwords..

It’s also worth noting how expiration warnings are going out: via RSS.
If you’re a member subscribed to either of the members-only feeds and
your membership is set to expire within the next two weeks, you’ll get
a personalized reminder as an item in the feeds. I’m not sending
reminders via email; those of you members who aren’t using the feeds,
consider this announcement your reminder. (Last time I checked,
somewhere around 4 out of 5 members were subscribed to at least one of
the feeds — they’ve proven to be even more popular than I expected.)

New Members

So, why join?

I put together a long outline of ideas to answer this, but when I
looked over it, it was pretty much a point-by-point rehashing of last
year’s announcement, “Something Daring”. I can’t say it better
now than I did then. If you’re a new reader, or otherwise feel like
you’re sitting on the fence, I encourage you to read that.

The gist of it is that I want for there to be a way for writers to
profit by publishing their own web sites, without whoring up their
site with ads, NASCAR-style — and I think direct support from
readers is it, or at least a big part of it. If I depend upon
advertising revenue, then I’m beholden to advertisers; if I depend
upon you, my readers, then all I’ve got to do to remain successful
is to continue writing stuff that you like to read. That sounds like
a fair deal.